June 2002
Computer Human Values is a nice rant about Cliff Nass’ research (amazing stuff which demonstrates that people interact with computers astonishingly similarly to how they interact with other people—like saying nicer things about an application if they are in the same room as the computer on which they saw the application!)
Too cool: warchalking. Now if we’re really emulating hobo signs, we’ll need to start including passwords for closed networks as well. And there probably needs to be an AvantGo channel or some other easily-synced PDA file (or maybe Vindigo should just include access points along with it’s restaurant listings).
Christina posted a thoughtful call for more depth of thinking about faceted classification
I think I’m more aggressive than my spam filter in deleting emails. Maybe someone needs to write up a set of tips for writing email subjects that don’t look like spam subjects.
Bad operating systems don’t die, they get remarketed. (Thanks to Tim McCoy and The GUI Gallery)
text sizing—up the garden path is a collection of screenshots showing what text will actually look like on different browsers using different techniques. Something I’ve conscientiously intended to do for years.. thank you Owen! ps—While I appreciate both the ingenuity and the intention, I think this hack is completely absurd and I hereby take a solemn oath never to take part in any such browser-coddling shenanigans. Text-resizing be damned. OK, so maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all.
Design aphorism of the day: Basing your design on the Fibonacci sequence is not the same thing as having a concept.